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US Eyes Robot Moon Missions as it Prepares For Astronauts' Return (reuters.com)
The United States wants to send robotic explorers to the moon as soon as next year as a preparatory step toward sending astronauts back there for the first time since 1972, a NASA official said on Monday. From a report: The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is planning a series of lunar missions beginning next year aimed at developing the capacity for a return to the moon, said Cheryl Warner, a spokeswoman for NASA's Human Exploration Directorate. NASA will work with private companies, which have not yet been chosen, on the missions, Warner said in a phone interview. U.S. President Donald Trump in December signed a directive that he said would enable astronauts to return to the moon and eventually lead a mission to Mars. Last month he ordered the government to review regulations on commercial space flights.
Like holding SpaceX to a higher standard than NASA to hold them back?
NASA deserves to be embarrassed. They wasted all the years between Apollo and now.
NASA deserves to be embarrassed. They wasted all the years between Apollo and now.
NASA takes their marching orders and gets their budget from Congress and the President. The fault lies with the owner of the purse strings if it lies with anyone. The Space Shuttle was a reasonable idea that failed because it had to satisfy too many groups and it sucked all the oxygen out of the room for decades. Then each President tries to give NASA a new priority but never pursues the funding to make it happen during their administration. Basically they make it impossible for NASA to do their job properly.
NASA has their faults to be sure but they are quite competent at many things. Cutting edge research, scientific exploration, technology development and transfer, and more. Though the Space Shuttle was a boondoggle it also was an amazing piece of technology that shows how capable NASA is. The problem for the last 30 years is that NASA has basically been stuck being a bus service to space instead of being tasked with pushing the boundaries of exploration and technology.
... should be to mine asteroids.
Talk about "security issues," like placing tariffs on imported cars because what if there's hostilities and we have all these foreign vehicles, how about our national dependency on those same foreigners for metals and minerals?
Had we not lost our goddam minds, we would have hospitable habitats for launching miners and for refining the ores before shipping to Earth or even manufacturing on the Moon and then using Amazon Prime, taking advantage of its free shipping.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
There's NASA, and then there's congress. Congress is pushing SLS, which is at this point an albatross around NASA's neck, because of its profit production for various companies in the states of various congress people.
In fairness to NASA and congress, we didn't know SpaceX would do so well when SLS was proposed and approved. But it's time to kill it.
Bruce Perens.
Manned missions are a deadend and a huge waste of money.
I could not disagree more. You can never declare any form of exploration a dead end before you have actually done the exploration. There are literally entire worlds to explore and things to discover that cannot be learned unless we actually send people there to learn them.
Robots/rovers can do everything humans can at 1/10 of the cost
They demonstrably cannot do everything humans can do nor can they do it anywhere near as fast or with similar flexibility. We don't have robots that capable here on Earth so your argument is dead before it even starts. A geologist dropped on the surface of the Moon or Mars can accomplish FAR more in a vastly shorter time than any robot we are in danger of developing. We're talking multiple orders of magnitude increases in productivity. Spirit and Opportunity took 8 years to cover the distance the Apollo astronauts covered in 3 days. There is a huge amount of technology relating to manned spaceflight that you literally cannot hope to develop unless you actually plan to send people into space. Not the least of these is discoveries relating to human physiology - good luck studying the effects of space travel on humans just using robots. We are still benefiting from the advances of the Apollo missions which have paid for NASA's budget since its inception as well as every robotic mission we've ever done many times over.